English Vowels Research Articles

English vowel phonemic awareness of jru basic education honor students and selected teachers

English vowel phonemic awareness of jru basic education honor students and selected teachers

Perceptual similarity spaces of British English vowels by speakers of Pakistani Urdu

Free classification was undertaken with 70 listeners from Lahore, Pakistan with Punjabi and Urdu as their first languages in order to shed light on the English vowel features that have been most relevant in developing the “new English” variety spoken by them (Pakistani English). The stimuli were 19 hVd words carrying the Southern British English (SSBE) vowels. The responses were statistically analyzed using hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. Listeners were sensitive to both F1 and F2, but could not distinguish the high-mid from the low-mid vowels. The central vowels /ɜː/ and /∧/ were in different groups indicating greater sensitivity to backness (F2): listeners classed /∧/ as back, but /ɜː/, which is more fronted in SSBE, as front. Diphthongs were grouped with monophthongs, sometimes based on the initial, sometimes on the final element; /aʊ/ /aɪ/ and /ɔɪ/, however, formed a separate group, possibly because their first and last element are most distinct. Listeners were not sensitive to d...

Asymmetrical patterns of formant variability in English vowels

Previous studies have claimed that lower formants should be weighted more than higher formants in a perceptual model of vowel perception (e.g., Schwartz et al., 1997). Given this formant weighting hypothesis, and if vowels have acoustic targets, vowels should be more variable in higher formant frequencies. Here, we examined within-speaker variability for five English vowels /æ, ʌ, ɔ, ɛ, ɪ/ in various contexts as produced by 32 speakers in the x-ray microbeam database (Westbury, 1994). For variabilities of the first three formants, only /ɔ/ follows this prediction (i.e., variability: F3 > F2 > F1) while /æ/ exhibits the opposite pattern; if we ignore F3 (as being less reliably measured), most vowels conform to the prediction (i.e., variability: F2 > F1), except for /æ/. Although the F2 variability is generally consistent with the perceptual model of vowel perception, it is also consistent with a possibly greater effect of consonant coarticulation (which is extensive here) on F2 relative to F1; this requires more testing. Further, while these results do not fully conform to the prediction made by the hypotheses, coproduction effects arising from the diverse contexts likely interact with the expected tendency. Correlation with observed kinematic variabilities will also be discussed. [Work supported by NIH grant DC-002717.]

A Study of the Intelligibility of Japanese Learners' English Vowels

A Study of the Intelligibility of Japanese Learners' English Vowels

Non-linear dimensionality reduction for correlated tongue measurement points

The tongue surface is a good indicator of the main supralaryngeal articulation of speech, and quantifying it with more points to measure increases accuracy. However, unlike acoustic variables (e.g., formants), articulatory variables (e.g., flesh-point pellets or multiple measurement points on an ultrasound image) are highly correlated to one another. Projecting the correlated variables with high dimensionality to lower is necessary. This study employs a nonlinear reduction method, Autoencoder (Hinton & Salakhutdinov, 2006), and compares its performance to that of Principal Component Analysis, which assumes orthogonality and linearity of dimensions. The two methods were applied to eight English vowels in clear speech from Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam dataset (Westbury, 1990). Root-mean-squared errors measured after the data reconstruction were analyzed by vowel type and pellet locations. Preliminary results with one speaker exhibited a slightly better performance than the nonlinear method, especially for some vowels (/i,u/). More speakers and time frames are predicted to lead to larger improvements of the nonlinearity analysis over the linear PCA. Similar tests of the two methods will be performed on the variabilities of the corresponding acoustic data. It is predicted that nonlinear analyses will make the variabilities in the acoustic and articulatory domains more comparable than previously assumed.

Assimilatory and dissimilatory L1 English vowel drift in early learners of Japanese

In contrast to predictions of the Speech Learning Model, Chang’s (2012) study of novice English-speaking learners of Korean finds no clear segment level assimilation between phonetically similar English and Korean vowels. The relative complexity of the Korean and English vowel systems may have made L2 to L1 vowel association inconsistent across speakers, leading to contradictory segment level effects. We examined vowels in L1 English:L2 Japanese learners, hypothesizing that the less dense vowel space in Japanese would simplify L1:L2 segment associations. Specifically, English [ɑ] and Japanese [a] should be associated by learners in a way that could lead to segment level L1 drift effects, allowing us to determine whether assimilatory L1 drift would occur in English for novice learners of Japanese, as Flege (1987, 1995) and Chang predict. Formant data for students in their first and second semester of Japanese instruction show mostly L1 assimilatory drift in F1, and some L1 dissimilation in F2, with most speakers making one change but not both. Overall, English [ɑ] variants stay within L1 norms, highlighting the importance of L1 phonetic repertoire in constraining L1 drift effects. Results will be compared to data for [i] and [u] to determine whether systemic level drift also occurs.

Exponential modeling of frequency-following responses in American neonates and adults

Frequency-following response (FFR) has been widely used to assess the mechanisms of speech processing for speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. For Chinese speaking adults, the characteristics of speech processing with increasing number of sweeps have been described with an exponential curve-fitting model; however, these characteristics for non-tonal language speakers have yet to be described in a similar manner. This study examined the characteristics of speech processing for both adults and neonates who speak a non-tonal language, to determine the goodness-of-fit of an exponential model to neonatal and adult FFRs, and compared the results between groups to determine if any differences exist. Twelve American neonates and 12 American adults were recruited for this study. Participants were native English speakers. The FFR was elicited using the English vowel /i/ with a rising pitch contour for a total of 8000 sweeps from each participant. From the three indices (Frequency Error, Tracking Accuracy and Pitch Strength) computed, the FFR trends were fit to an exponential curve-fitting model to estimate the frequency tracking acuity and neural phase-locking magnitude when the amount of sweeps increased in the averaged waveform. Significant differences between groups were found for the objective indices.

Identification of vowels of two different varieties of English by native speakers of Japanese and Korean

Native speakers of Japanese and Korean heard and identified /i, ɪ, eɪ, ɛ, ae, ɑ, ʌ/ uttered in /bVd/, /dVd/ and /kVd/ frames by native speakers of American and New Zealand English. New Zealand English has gone through an idiosyncratic vowel shift. For instance, /ae/ and /ɛ/ are raised and /ɪ/ is centralized. Overall American English vowels are identified more accurately by the two listener groups. Both listener groups identified American English /ɛ, ae/ better than New Zealand English equivalents, but on the contrary American English /ɑ/ is less accurately identified than New Zealand English /ɑ/ (or /ɒ/). Despite these similarities, some differences are observed between the two listener groups. While Japanese listeners identified New Zealand English /i, ɪ,/ less accurately than American English /i, ɪ/, Korean listeners identified New Zealand English /ɪ/ more accurately than American English /ɪ/. Japanese listeners outperformed Korean listeners in identifying American English /eɪ/ and New Zealand English /ɑ,/...

Vowel undershoot in the production of nonwords by English and Mandarin speakers

In a previous study (Yang, 2011), it was found that both Mandarin and English speakers showed vowel undershoot (characterized by decreased vowel duration and lowered first formant) in the production of English vowels while reading a list of real words, but Mandarin speakers could not make a clear tense-lax distinction. The current study aims at examining the degree of undershoot and tense-lax distinction when speakers had to reproduce what they heard without any visual input. In a nonword repetition task, Mandarin and English speakers were auditorily presented with a list, consisting of 8 English nonword triplets with the target vowels /i, ɪ, eɪ, ɛ/ embedded: monosyllables, disyllables and trisyllables. Each trial began with a short training session where participants listened to the nonwords in each triplet as many times as they wanted. After training, each nonword were played three times and participants repeated after each token. Our preliminary data showed that English speakers, while maintaining the tense-lax distinction, showed undershoot when producing nonwords across the three syllabic conditions. On the contrary, Mandarin speakers showed very limited undershoot and unclear tense-lax distinction across the three syllabic conditions, especially between /eɪ/ and /ɛ/. [Yu-Jung Lin and Kuan-Yi Chao contributed equally to this project.]

Early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults' identification of American English vowels

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US (US Census Bureau, 2011) and are learning American English (AE) as a second language (L2). Accurate perception of AE vowels is important because vowels carry a large part of the speech signal (Kewley-Port, Burkle, & Lee, 2007). The present study examined the accuracy with which early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults identify AE vowels. Listeners were presented with AE vowels (/i/, / I /, /ɛ/, /ʌ/, /ae /, /ɑ/, and /o/) in a /gəbVpə/ context. They were instructed to click on the key word response from a choice of nonsense words that contained the second vowel they heard. Findings indicate that identification accuracy of L2 vowels was significantly higher with early age of L2 acquisition. However, early bilingual listeners’ vowel perception was not native-like, suggesting that the phonetic properties of their native language influenced L2 speech perception. Additionally, identification accuracy varied as a function of the particular vowel,...

Second language pronunciation training using acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

The current work presents articulatory kinematic, acoustic, and perceptual data characterizing the effects of how visual biofeedback derived from acoustic-to-articulatory inversion may influence vowel pronunciation training for native-Mandarin speakers of English. Ten participants were engaged in a six-week pronunciation training program that included a focus on English vowel production. As an addition to traditional pronunciation training techniques often used by speech-language pathologists, half of the participants were also provided with visual biofeedback displays detailing aspects of their current tongue position as well as idealized positions for vowel targets. Visual displays were obtained using an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion model based on the Parallel Reference Speaker Weighting (PRSW) method for model adaptation. Pre- and post-training changes in articulation were compared between participants that used only traditional pronunciation training methods and those who were given visual biofeedback based on acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. Data analyses focus on articulatory-kinematic measures, obtained via electromagnetic articulography, measures of vowel formant frequencies, and perceptual assessments based on phonetic transcriptions from expert listeners. The results of the current work provide insights regarding the value of PRSW-based adaptation of acoustic-to-articulatory inversion models and the resulting visual feedback displays as tools in second-language learning of English pronunciation.

Mandarin Chinese Speakers’ Production of English Vowel Duration as a Function of Coda Voicing and Syllable Number

The current study compared native English-speaking adults’ and native Mandarin-speaking adults’ ability to produce context-specific vowel duration differences under the assumption that variability is higher in non-native language learners’ production. A total of twenty native Mandarin and English speakers produced real English words in a frame sentence multiple times. The mean vowel and consonant closure duration and vowel duration variability were analyzed. The results were that Mandarin Chinese speakers produced considerably smaller contrasts but greater temporal variability than English speakers in their production of individual words. The results indicated that the phonological knowledge of L1 is likely to interfere with the temporal patterns of L2 production.

Advanced Spanish university students problems with the pronunciation of English vowels. Identification, analysis and teaching implications

Abstract: Previous research has tended to focus on the main diffi culties that Spanish learners of English have with pronunciation due to total and partial differences between the phonological systems of the L1 and L2. The present study aims to contribute to this fi eld, providing empirical data on the specifi c problems with the pronunciation of vowels of a group of advanced learners. Findings indicate that several English vowels, especially the north, palm, schwa and goat vowels, continue to pose many diffi culties at higher levels of profi ciency; hence the teaching of these sounds should be emphasised at earlier stages. Keywords: EFL, pronunciation, vowels, advanced Spanish learners, teaching. Resumen: Investigaciones previas se han concentrado en las principales difi cultades que los estudiantes españoles de inglés tienen con la pronunciación debido a las diferencias totales y parciales entre los sistemas fonéticos de la primera y segunda lengua. Este estudio pretende hacer una aportación en este campo al ofrecer datos empíricos sobre las difi cultades específi cas de estudiantes avanzados con las vocales. Los resultados indican que algunas vocales, especialmente las vocales north, palm, schwa y goat, continúan siendo un problema para los alumnos avanzados y, por lo tanto, se debería de enfatizar la enseñanza de dichos sonidos desde niveles inferiores.

Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community

AbstractThis paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.

Analysis of Errors in the Transcription of Simple English Vowels (Monophthongs) by Egyptian Phonetics Students

Analysis of Errors in the Transcription of Simple English Vowels (Monophthongs) by Egyptian Phonetics Students

Voice Onset Time (VOT) and Vowel Duration

This study investigates the effects of voicing of a preceding and following plosive on the Voice Onset Time (VOT) and vowel duration. The data consist of words with CVC segments, with the four groups of samples that represent both voiced and voiceless plosives, both for the ones following and preceding the vowels. The preliminary hypothesis is that voicing of following plosives affects the length of the vowels, indicated by the vowel duration, and VOT is affected by the voicing of thepreceding plosives, not the following plosives. To compare the effects of voicing on the lengths of the vowel duration and VOT, the sound files are analyzed using the Praat program. The results of this study show that the voicing of the following plosives affects the vowel duration, while the voicing of the preceding plosives does not affect the vowel duration. The results also show that it is the voicing of the C1 plosives that affect the VOT. The word-ending plosives do not affect the VOT of the preceding plosives.This study is on English vowel duration and VOT affected by the following and preceding stops. A further study can be done to compare the results of the effects with another language.DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2012.150201

The phonetics–phonology interface: Representations and methodologies ed. by Joaquín Romero and María Riera

Reviewed by: The phonetics–phonology interface: Representations and methodologies ed. by Joaquín Romero and María Riera Felicitas Kleber The phonetics–phonology interface: Representations and methodologies. Ed. by Joaquín Romero and María Riera. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. xxi, 288. ISBN 9789027248541. $149 (Hb). This book presents thirteen papers from the 5th Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia (PaPI) conference in June 2011 in Tarragona, Spain. These papers were selected because they ‘showcase… the thematic and methodological richness of the work presented at the 2011 meeting…that goes beyond the Romance realm’ (vii) and because they ‘represent a multifaceted cross section of current work on the phonetics-phonology interface’ (xix). The majority of the papers focus on Romance languages, but many will nonetheless be of interest to phoneticians and laboratory phonologists working on other languages. The volume includes papers from leading experts in the field as well as junior scientists and is intended for experienced researchers. The thirteen papers are organized into four parts and are preceded by the editors’ introduction, which gives a critical overview of the past and current state of research and frames the following chapters in a very detailed and useful way. In particular, the editors highlight how the papers address the book’s ‘goal of deepening our understanding of the phonetics-phonology interface’ (xix) and suggest broader implications that are not always apparent in the individual papers. The first part is on ‘First and second language acquisition’ and opens with a review chapter by Catherine T. Best entitled ‘Devil or angel in the details? Perceiving phonetic variation as information [End Page 247] about phonological structure’. The author reviews earlier research in which variation was typically viewed as noise that needs to be factored out in order to unveil the abstract phonological structure; she then convincingly argues in favor of the role of phonetic variation in the acquisition of phonological structure. Best draws upon growing evidence suggesting that language learners of all ages benefit from variation in production and thus in perception when shaping their first and second language (L2) phonologies. With their study on ‘Effects of Spanish use on the production of Catalan vowels by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals’, Joan Carles Mora, James L. Keidel, and James E. Flege contribute to two issues in L2 research, namely language dominance and age of bilingualism. They show that production of and exposure to Catalan and Spanish shape the ways in which the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts are maintained or merged—potentially leading to a change. Variation is again mentioned as an important factor but is not addressed directly in the otherwise careful acoustic analysis. In ‘Cues to dialectal discrimination in early infancy: A look at prosodic, rhythmic and segmental properties in utterances from two Catalan dialects’, Marta Ortega-Llebaria and Laura Bosch compare durational (i.e. rhythmic) measures with the distribution of vowels in unstressed syllables, which differs in the two dialects. The aim was to disentangle possible acoustic effects that may have helped five-month-olds in a previous pilot study to discriminate eastern from western Catalan dialects. The findings point to vocalic rather than rhythmic differences. The paper might have made reference to the wealth of literature that is critical of rhythmic measures (as, for example, addressed by Nava and Goldstein in this volume) and that has demonstrated the difficulty of grouping languages (and even more so dialects) according to simple rhythm typologies (e.g. Grabe & Low 2002, Arvaniti 2009). Given that many dialects differ foremost in vocalic features (e.g. English varieties), it is indeed worthwhile to further investigate the extent to which young infants pick up on these cues. In ‘Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations: A reassessment of English vowels in French’, Sharon Peperkamp investigates French listeners’ perception of American English vowels presented within the original context (flanked by labial consonants) or in isolation. The author compares the results to on-line adaptations of French speakers to the same CVC stimuli that were obtained in a previous study. Different responses to spliced (where listeners could not compensate for coarticulatory effects) vs. unspliced vowels (where...

Development of Novel Lip-Reading Recognition Algorithm

Total laryngectomy is a common treatment for patients with advanced laryngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer, but it is also a result from the loss of the natural voice and directly affects the basic communication functions in daily life. Reconstructing the basic communication function is an important issue for these patients after total laryngectomy surgery. Recently, the image processing technique for lip-reading recognition has been widely developed and applied in various kinds of applications. It is also one of the possibly alternative approaches to reconstructing the basic communication function for these patients after total laryngectomy surgery. Although many human lip-reading recognition methods have been developed to detect lip contour precisely, detecting pronouncing lip contour effectively is still a difficult challenge. In this paper, a novel lip-reading recognition algorithm was proposed to recognize English vowels from the lip contour when speaking. Here, several criteria for detecting the mouth region of interest (ROI) were designed to reduce the error rate of detecting the mouth ROI and lip contour. Moreover, several lip parameters, including the width, height, contour points, area, and the ratio (width/height) of lips, were used to recognize the lip contour and English vowels when speaking. The advantages of the proposed method are that it could detect the mouth ROI automatically, reduce the influence of individual differences, such as the individual lip shape or makeup effect, and it also could perform a good performance without pretraining. Finally, the performance of lip-reading recognition under different backgrounds and individual differences was also tested, and the accuracy of the proposed algorithm on lip-reading recognition was over 80%.

Comparative Study on Formant Displacement in Reading Rate between Korean and English Vowels of Korean Speakers

Comparative Study on Formant Displacement in Reading Rate between Korean and English Vowels of Korean Speakers

Acoustic analysis of the production of English monophthongs in Serbian EFL speakers at tertiary level

In learning and mastering a foreign language, adequate acquisition of a vowel system is regarded as particularly important, both for the speech intelligibility and successful communication. However, it is an undeniable fact that 'foreign accent' often remains present in foreign language speakers, regardless of their level of knowledge, primarily due to the interference and transfer of phonetic/phonological characteristics of the mother tongue. This paper examines phonological competencies of ESL students at tertiary level in the field of English vowel system. Students' ability to accurately and adequately recognize and produce qualitative and quantitative distinctions of relevant elements of the English phonological system through the oppositions of monophthongs [ɪ] - [i:], [e] - [æ], [ʌ] - [ɑː], [ɒ] - [ɔː], [ʊ] - [u:] is examined through an acoustic analysis of speech. The experiment included ten male participants, i.e. five freshmen and five seniors. The acoustic analysis attempted to explain how the period of two years of intensive English Language classes influenced the development of phonetic/phonological competencies in the field of monophthongs in the production of final-year students. The results are rather similar in both groups, with only a few exceptions. The period of two years of intensive learning of English as a foreign language did not provide noticeable results in the acquisition of vowels, but proved that the phonological competences of both groups are at the same level.